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Slaine: Lord of Misrule

Started by Ancient Otter, 01 April, 2011, 09:33:58 PM

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Ancient Otter

Got on my hands on this today. Contents are:

Introduction by Clint Langley
The Name of the Sword
Lord of Misrule
The Bowels of Hell
Covers, a Clint Langley pinup and his sketch for the Lord of Misrule pitch.



TordelBack

Can't wait - I've been stockpiling Waterstones points for just this purpose, for so long in fact that Waterstones Dublin branches have closed in the meantime.  The Sláine reprint series has been fantastic (printing error on the Diceman episode aside), and with this volume we move into some unread territory for me.  Think I'll pop into Hodges Figgis tomorrow...

I am sad to see we won't get the usual Mills Madness for an intro, but it'll be interesting to see what Langley has to say about his pre-digital work.

Ancient Otter

Clint's art comes off as more clearer than Greg's in my copy. Clint mentions in the introduction the original films were lost, so all his original art was rescanned and the colour enhanced.

ThryllSeekyr

I thought they might have included another Diceman story.

SmallBlueThing

Right, so, by my reckoning that leaves:

517 pages of strip left to reprint, up to the start of The Books of Invasions, plus 44 pages of Dice Man stuff, plus covers and posters, etc.

This includes The Battle of Clontarf (annual 1985, which really should have been in an earlier volume) and The Arrow of God (annual 1989, ditto). But not Devil's Banquet, which this site reckons was in the 1986 Sci-Fi Special, but wasnt.

So, what do we reckon- four more volumes? That'd take us up to BoI and from then on, everything's likely to see print in hardback i guess.

SBT
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SmallBlueThing

After buying this on saturday, i finally got around to reading it last night.
As i remembered from the progs, langley's art breathes fresh life into the strip after the preceding bisley-clone leaves. The lord of misrule is jampacked with incredible creatures, but it's about here that the voices decrying pat's 'preaching' begin to shout loudest. I can see what they mean, but to me it's all part of the magnificence of mr mills. The prog 1000 strip is overly shiny and fills space that would have been better spent allowing langley to paint instead.
A pretty good collection, notable for the beginning of the end of bisley's influence, and the start of modern Slaine. Cant wait for the next one.
SBT
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locustsofdeath!

Quote from: SmallBlueThing on 11 April, 2011, 10:48:55 AM
After buying this on saturday, i finally got around to reading it last night.
langley's art breathes fresh life into the strip after the preceding bisley-clone leaves.

Langley's art on Lord of Misrule is the main reason I've always lamented his switch to digital: it's breathtaking, flowing, majestic and drawn with amazing detail. Reminds me of Barry WS to a great extent (somewhere on the forum, maybe a couple of years ago - I searched and couldn't find it - I posted comparisons between BWS's Conan and Langley's LoM Slaine).

JayzusB.Christ

See now, I've always liked Lord of Misrule.  The whole Fomorian invasion / Slough Feg thing peaked during the Horned God and has been detumescing ever since. 

The Robin Hood / Midsummer Night's Dream thing was a welcome break from it all.  The two art droids were doing excellent work, and yeah, I preferred the Langley lad's line drawing to his digital art too. 

Religion-wise, yeah, the whole pagan good / jesus bad thing was a bit shoved down one's throat. At the time, though, Ireland was still struggling out of the corrupt grip of Catholicism, so I was happy enough to see an opposing view. 
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

TordelBack

#8
I'd never read more than a few episodes out of this entire collection, and I'd really been looking forward to it.

It's a strange one, but I enjoyed it greatly.  

Starting with the best aspect, Langley's art on the bulk of the pages is a breath of fresh, lively air - I honestly think his Blood God 'revealed' is one of the greatest creature designs in the history of the comic, genuinely disturbing and dimensionally-twisted.  His Sláine has such a different style from any of his predecessors (or indeed his own later work) that it takes a few episodes to get used to, and then it really shines with detail, energy and bare bottoms.  Oh so many lovely bare bottoms.  

Both the basic concept and the plot were quite surprising, and very interesting.  Hearing about the story over the years, and from the few pages I'd read, I hadn't liked the idea of 'Sláine as Robin, Niamh as Marian' but the heavy-handed Millsian slant means that it actually works well.  I enjoyed the usual Mills take on witches and trials, on the God of Lies and his True Name (and nature), and his version of the Merry Men as the Wild Hunt.  I also think that this storyline makes more sense of the 'time-travelling warrior for the Goddess' concept than earlier or later examples that I have read, managing to reconcile or maybe just merge the Cythrons, Dark Gods, dimensional shenanigans and time-spirals with the more fantasy-based Goddess/Cauldron/reincarnation aspect.  

Then there are the weaker aspects.  Greg Staples' art (in my copy at least) is impenetrably murky - sometimes I had to shine my bedside lamp directly on to the page to pick out the figures.  I can well believe that this is a reproduction issue, but even so, there are problems: in stark contrast to the art on the earlier B&W stories (Bellardinelli, McMahon, Fabry, Pugh, Collins) which revelled in the details of the settings, there is absolutely no sense of place here.  There are virtually no backgrounds, and when there are they are just hint of snowy forest, generic craggy mountain.

I could just about buy this with Bisley, because The Horned God had the timeless placeless epic quality,  but what is the point of transporting Sláine to the very-specific milieu of England 1140AD if it looks like Generic Fantasy World?  Surely the fantastic elements of the forest folk should be contrasted with the realistic grime of Norman Britain?  Marian's tiled-floor abbey is the only location that gives any sense of it being somewhere other.  Seeing as Greg has turned in some excellent Sláine in his time, and indeed there are some fabulous pages here (the Ukko splash in particular) I can't help feeling that this is a problem of the painted art period full-stop, but it's one that reaches its zenith here.  

Langley's art isn't entirely devoid of this problem either, with his backgrounds having a fantastic dimension that doesn't scream medieval England to me, but at least there's sufficient detail in clothes, set-dressing and architecture to be sure that this isn't some non-descript corner of Tir-na-nÓg.

Then there's the real problem: structure.  There is far too much recapping, repetition of information and phrases (yes, I know it's a storytelling convention), random dead-ends and then an abrupt 'one year later' finish to make for a truly satisfying one-sitting read.  For me, the succession of quickly-offed villains from the abbot to the Sheriff to the priest-guy stall the narrative repeatedly. I appreciate that stops and starts in original publication probably created this problem, but I'm judging it harshly purely on the collection.  It's a very noble effort, but the overall result doesn't really do justice to the story.

But those moans are small-beer compared to a dense yet lively and very fun read, which continues the twin Sláine traditions of innovative and gob-smacking art and clever twists on familiar tales.  With each of these reprint volumes, I find myself re-evaluating my should-really-have-ended-with-The-Horned-God position.

JayzusB.Christ

^^^ This.  Kind of what I was trying to say, but better. My position would probably be that it should have ended with the Horned God, though maybe throwing in a couple of extras like this one and Carnival as special, one-off treats, rather than lots and lots of Fomorian / Cythron / Medb-and-Feg-back-from-the-dead rehashes of what had already been done better.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

James Stacey


SmallBlueThing

Quote from: James Stacey on 14 April, 2011, 03:18:27 PM
Not sure if this has been posted here

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/04/14/after-and-before-how-clint-langley-recoloured-slaine-lord-of-misrule/

Well, bugger me. I was going to look out the progs and "see if I could spot the changes" Langley had made- and then come on here, start a thread, and appear all clever and beady-eyed amoungst my peers, thinking you'd need some sharp vision to see them. But really, that's a complete makeover isn't it? I'm now going to definately get the progs out and marvel at that in the flesh, so to speak. Stunning stuff, and it enhances it no end.

SBT
.

James Stacey

It's certainly more than a recolouring isn't it.

Emperor

It is certainly a big change.

Langley seems to have redrawn part of the fourth panel on the second page or it is that he has zoomed in on the original art (as the details are the same)? The last panel of the second page also looks redrawn - rather than looking down it is slightly tighter in one him and he is glowering at us (the second to last panel too is a tighter shot, as is the one before of Ukko now I look hard). In addition, I know it is only a small touch but the extra panel border, with the last panel on the first page, does make a big improvement.

The recolouring has given it a more painterly feel, which is probably more what Pat is after these days (it is probably also a mercy that it has covered up the dangly bits in the first panel of the first page - lower thigh and crotch fringe? That would give folks nightmares, although I am wondering if I can somehow shave my legs to... no, stop there). More importantly, the changes give Slaine a lot more brooding intensity (as opposed to looking surprised and perturbed) and the slaphead looks considerably more menacing.

However, I don't really like the lighting effect in the bottom right panel (which appears to overlay the lettering too) and that kind of spraycan halo around some of the balloons looks a bit weird, although I presume it is to make them standout against the darker background (second page top left panel and two panels on the bottom right).

The lettering is untouched as far as I can tell but looks a little odd (although the letters themselves are spot on) - Jim leaves a comment on it over on BC in relation to tails, but there is also very slight white outline on the balloons too. I assume this is also to make them stand out but it just looks like someone didn't cut close enough to the line with the scissors (which is not how I assume they were done but still...). If you are going to have the art redone it might have been an idea to get someone in to redraw the balloons (Jim is rather good at this, as the Hookjaw samples show, but I'm sure Simon Bowland would have been more than capable of handling the gig).

So overall a big improvement and I think the book will feel more consistent, as it looks to watch the tones of Greg Staples work better too. I am very impressed with the extra effort that has gone into some of the recent collections, like Leigh Gallagher's redrawing some panels of Defoe, so fingers crossed it translates well into sales.
if I went 'round saying I was an Emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

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Jim_Campbell

Quote from: Emperor on 14 April, 2011, 06:01:23 PM
The lettering is untouched as far as I can tell but looks a little odd (although the letters themselves are spot on) - Jim leaves a comment on it over on BC in relation to tails, but there is also very slight white outline on the balloons too. I assume this is also to make them stand out but it just looks like someone didn't cut close enough to the line with the scissors (which is not how I assume they were done but still...)

In the early days of computer lettering in this country, it wasn't unheard of for letterers to print out their computer-generated balloons and cut them out, sticking them down on an acetate overlay so that they could be scanned in along with the artwork. Given that these balloons were being created on a digital file that would have a transparent background anyway, this struck me as an astonishing amount of entirely redundant work. However, if you're used to working in a particular way, I can understand why you might want to advance in half-steps.

For at least the first issue of Dæmonifuge, this was how Fiona Stephenson did her lettering, which was doubly odd, because Kev was supplying his artwork to GW as digital files so the only part of the strip that was getting scanned in was Fiona's lettering!

Cheers

Jim
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